. Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Seven

Episode Seven of the PBS Documentary, entitled, “The Veneer of Civilization,” covers the period June 1968-April 1969. By April 1968 there were 543,432 American soldiers in Vietnam; 40,794 American dead; and the United States had spent 70 billion on the war.

The previous episode covered the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, mass riots that followed, and the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy on June 9, the night he ostensibly won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Episode Seven covers confrontations In Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon as President. Despite the ways these events related to the war and their enormous effects in shaping what was happening at home, disappointingly, the film footage in both episodes continued to concentrate on military battles and the voices of men who fought, ignoring the stories and voices of growing numbers of Americans who opposed the war.

As riveting and emotional as some of the battles and feelings of the fighters are, the lack of a wider lens gets boring. I’ve heard from several friends who have stopped  watching the series.  Here’s a link to a podcast with Tom Fox, who after the war for many years was Editor and Publisher of the National Catholic Reporter. During the war Tom served with International Voluntary Services working with Vietnamese (estimated at 3 million) who had been forced from their villages in the countryside by massive US bombing and Agent Orange raids.  So far in the series, the film ignores Tom’s story and the stories of hundreds of other courageous, dedicated young Americans who spoke Vietnamese and worked with IVS or with the Quaker Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Center in Quang Ngai, a province very heavily bombed and sprayed with Agent Orange, where 40% of the population had been displaced into refugee camps.

The numbers of men resisting the draft, resisting the war within the military, and fleeing and deserting to Canada or Sweden grew significantly in 1967 and 1968. In a two page Ad in The New York Times 100 student body presidents declared, “We believe the war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral, and we should not be forced to fight in it.”  100,000 draft age youth across the country signed pledge cards making this same declaration.  Dr. Benjamn Spock, the famous baby doctor, and Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Chaplain at Yale, and three others faced federal trial for supporting draft resistance. Nine Catholic activists, including Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan stole and burned draft files in Catonsville, Maryland. Mixed-age community groups gathered at local Draft Boards across the country and read the names of all the Americans who had been killed so far in Vietnam. Muhammed Ali spoke for a growing number of African Americans when he refused military service and declared, “No Vietnamese ever call me nigger.” None of this, none of these American stories have been given significant attention or time in the film.

Another important dimension of what was happening at home related to the war were debates about strategy for the ant-war movement. The film does a relatively good job portraying debates about war fighting strategies among military and political leaders on both sides, and revealing the skepticism and sometimes spoken or unspoken dissent over particular strategies by the men and women actually doing the fighting. The film needed to take the same approach to debates about strategy for the anti-war movement. What was the goal and strategy of the October 1967 “Confront the Warmakers” demonstration at the Pentagon, the Student Strike at Columbia University in April 1968, and the mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 – and what actually was accomplished by these actions.

To achieve understanding of these events would have required Burns and Novick to include diverse perspectives and voices, just as they did in relation to war fighting strategies. Clearly, they decided not to do this and, as a consequence, the film’s contribution to understanding what was happening at home is much weaker than it might have been.

The stories of resistance to the war, like some of the stories of awful things American soldiers admitted doing in the war, and debates about strategies will surely be controversial. It is precisely this fuller, whole story, however, which needed to be found in the film if the multiple truths in the war or about the anti-war movement, and the preponderant truth, if there is one about this particular war or anti-war movement, are going to be perceived by the film’s audience, and lessons learned. So far, sadly, I don’t think it’s happening.